On June 30, Tucker Paving Inc. happily launched the very first issue of its new monthly e-newsletter (email newsletter) and delivered it to email inboxes all throughout Central Florida. In an obvious play on our company name, the e-newsletter is titled Paving the Way. Joining our website, this blog section, and our various social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest), the e-newsletter is another vehicle we have to share all the good things happening at our growing construction company and with our team members.

This e-newsletter content will include links to selected blog articles on our website, photos, and various tidbits of information that we hope will be interesting and useful to a wide and diverse audience. The first e-newsletter includes links to blog items about our community involvement and the goings-on in 1994, the year our company was founded; and a photo capturing a recent safety training event for several of our employees. (In the business sector we’re in, there can never be too much safety training!)

If you weren’t on the email list to receive the first issue of Paving the Way, you can see it in a Web browser format at http://bit.ly/2967AGU. If you would like have future issues of the e-newsletter sent to you by email, it’s easy to sign up; just click over to http://www.tuckerpaving.com/contact-us/ and provide us with your name and email address in the “Subscribe to our Newsletter” box in the middle of the Web page, on the right-hand side.

We hope you’ll enjoy Paving the Way and the links it provides to Tucker Paving-related digital content on the World Wide Web. Comments are welcome via the contact Web page referenced above.

If you enjoy good American business success stories (no, we’re not going to brag — this time — about Tucker Paving Inc.), we have one for you.

It’s about YETI Coolers. That’s the company that makes the insulated bottle we’re going to give away — and soon, we hope — following our Tucker Paving “Road to 1,500 Likes” event on Facebook. (For event details, click over to www.facebook.com/tuckerpaving. Look for a post with a gold background and a picture of the bottle.)

The need to accurately name and describe the beverage bottle — it’s a 36-ounce Rambler model — had us going to the YETI website (yeticoolers.com) for details. We got stuck there for a few minutes, reading the YETI story. Here are some highlights:

• “YETI was born out of frustration,” by fishermen brothers Roy Seiders and Ryan Seiders, “and molded by experience.” The brothers typically use ice chests as casting platforms during their fishing trips.

• “… (T)he coolers that were out there just weren’t up to our outdoor adventures — the handles would break, the latches would snap off and the lids would cave-in,” the brothers write on the YETI website. “Not only was it a hassle to replace our coolers after each season, but these cheaply built, ordinary ice chests were limiting our good times. And that frustration led us to a solution.”

• “In 2006 we founded YETI Coolers with a simple mission: build the cooler we’d use every day if it existed. … One that simply wouldn’t break.”

• The company later ventured beyond just hardy ice chests and now also manufactures vacuum-insulated stainless-steel drinkware (like the Rambler bottle we’re giving away), soft coolers, and other outdoor gear and accessories.

Built on sturdiness and quality, the YETI coolers were launched at a price point much higher than regular ice chests, but that didn’t keep the new brand from taking off in the marketplace. A headline and subhead in Inc. magazine put it this way: “How Two Brothers Turned a $300 Cooler Into a $450 Million Cult Brand. When two frustrated fishermen set out to reinvent the cooler, they didn’t expect to upend an industry.” (www.inc.com)

The brothers sold their company to Cortec Group in 2012, but Roy Seiders still runs it today as CEO from headquarters in Austin, Texas.

How’s that for a success story? Two brothers wanting solid coolers to pull double duty as fishing perches decide to build their own and go from frustrated to flush with cash — proving once again that quality in product and business has its own reward.

Whoever he or she is, the Facebook-using winner of the YETI Rambler from Tucker Paving will get a quality product, and we can’t wait to give it away.

Whether it’s old asphalt, old concrete, or even moved and unneeded dirt, we at Tucker Paving don’t like for any of it to go to waste. That why, in the case of asphalt and concrete, we chop it up into very small pieces, use as much as we can for our own jobs, and put the rest up for sale. In the case of dirt — clean fill dirt — we occasionally offer that for sale, too.

Asphalt millings are great for country roads, long private drives from paved roads to houses or barns, driveways on unrestricted properties, and even parking lots in some situations.

If you’re thinking about using traditional gravel for a project, you might want to consider using asphalt millings instead. Essentially recycled asphalt pavement (RAP), asphalt millings are relatively low in cost, long lasting, eco-friendly, almost maintenance free, and adaptable in all kinds of weather. However — and this is a big “however” — be careful with your selection of aggregate for areas that require good drainage. As time goes by, RAP will tend to compact in the soil and become, like pavement, fairly impermeable.

If you have questions about typical or potential uses for recycled concrete or asphalt, or if you want to inquire about purchasing recycled aggregate or clean fill dirt, e-mail Barret Tucker at barret@tuckerpaving.com.

Both at the employee level and at the team level, multitasking is SOP (standard operating procedure) here at Tucker Paving, Inc. It has to be if we want to keep up with the demand for our services (we do), if we want to fulfill our commitments in a quality and timely manner (we do), and if we want to see continued growth in our company (we do on that, too).

Multitasking can take on many forms. In construction, its most visible form usually means working on more than one job on more than one site at the very same time. We’re thankful that our growth through the years — in the number of employees, in the depth and breadth of our mechanized assets, and in the scope of our services, among other things — has given us the ability to do just that: The ability to work on several jobs at one time.

If you had been given the opportunity to drive all over Central Florida in May, you could have found Tucker Paving crews and equipment on several job sites, including the following:

• The new campus for Our Children’s Academy in Lake Wales.

• A public parking site in downtown Auburndale.

• The rising public parking garage facing the Polk County Courthouse and the county’s Neil Combee Administration Building in Bartow.

• The Oakwood Estates mobile home community in unincorporated southwest Winter Haven.

• The new Waterside Village subdivision in southeast Winter Haven.

• A Bancroft Boulevard improvement project near the new Wedgefield K-8 School in east Orange County.

Some of those projects have been completed. The others remain under way.

Multitasking is an art form — most certainly in construction — and we’re fortunate to have excellent artists (project managers and site-work supervisors among them) on the Tucker team.

(NOTE: If you want to keep tabs on Tucker Paving projects almost daily, click over to our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/tuckerpaving and “Like” us.)